I've been really meaning to play another Tales game this year, but getting hella addicted to first Atelier (beaten ten games so far this year ^^;) and then SMT (beat four games ^^;) really didn't help that effort XD. So I looked at the ones I had on hand to play, and I figured Xillia would fit the bill well, as that's the one immediately after my favorite, Graces, and it's one I've had recommended in particular from several friends in the past. It took me some 51 or so hours (and then mucking about for another 10 or so in post-game) to finish the Japanese version of the game, and I enjoyed my time with it very much ^w^
Tales of Xillia is the first game in the Tales series (to the best of my knowledge) to take a page from the Atelier playbook and have two main characters instead of one. First you have Jude, the 15 year old med school student who becomes embroiled in trying to stop a plot by his city/kingdom to plunge the world into war (or worse). Then you have Milla, the living avatar of the master of elementals, Maxwell, who is the one who embroils Jude in trying to destroy the evil Jin machinery that the government is trying to use for evil purposes. There's a cast of four main/playable characters outside of them, but they're the two the plot primarily revolves around. You can actually pick from playing either's route before you start the game, but Jude's is the one you should play first (as I did) and it's also the most complete. Milla's perspective on things is almost identical to Jude's, and Jude is the real main character when all is said and done, no matter how much Namco may try to pretend otherwise (although Milla is a very good #2 story focus). I really loved the story and especially the character writing in Tales of Graces, and Tales of Xillia did not disappoint on that front either. All six of the main cast are really well portrayed and developed (with my personal favorite being Teepo), with the story's main themes being conviction, duty, and finding one's purpose. The antagonist is also very interesting for a JRPG, as I really can't think of any other one that I've played where the ultimate conflict between the main hero and villain comes down to such an almost mutually agreed upon point that their conflict ends the way it does here. Being a more recent Tales game, this is a longer story with two major twists (although it's oddly enough split across four acts), and I think it handles the writing really well in the way Tales so often does. The familiar fantasy-with-technology setting and larger themes of environmentalism and anti-colonialism are here, sure, but they're done in an entertaining and still unique way from other Tales games to make this one as engaging as ever. The gameplay has changed a little and a lot, but it's mostly changed in the very incremental way that the Tales series is so reliable with. Where Vesperia had learnable skills tied to weapons you equipped and Graces had skills tied to your titles you equipped, now equippable skills are tied to a large sphere grid-style board you can slot points into upon leveling up. It also provides stat buffs and such on top of what you get for normally leveling up, but it isn't anything super revolutionary (although it is a trend the series would continue for some time). The way you walk around the world has also changed, with the narrower corridors that used to define dungeons and fields being replaced with wider areas, particularly in the fields. You can look around these locations for materials and treasure chests, but it again isn't a terribly significant change to how things had been done so far. The game has no overworld, but it does have fast travel available very early, and the way it does its shops is also quite clever. Instead of having multiple shops, all types of shop are effectively the same all over the world (no hunting for that ONE shop that sells the thing you need), and you use those materials you win in battles or find around the world to trade in and upgrade them and the stock they hold. It's a very neat idea to reward exploration and also make shopping much more convenient. The combat system has the same sort of combo/chain limit style that Tales of Graces has, but refined even further so it doesn't have nearly such a steep learning curve as that one did. However, while they have kept the chain system, they've also re-introduced a mana system, so you can't use artes and special moves like you used to. They take a lot of how technical and important your movement was (side-steps are completely removed) and refocus it instead on dodging and attacks that more easily flow into one another. A really cool move that Jude can do is if he dodges with a back-step just before an attack, he teleports behind the enemy to hit them for higher damage! This also helps build up your link gauge faster, and linking is this game's overlimit mechanic. During battle, you can link to another party member, and they'll both gain a special power to use in battle as well as help you kill whatever you're killing (both guarding your back as well as helping you focus-fire). When you've either taken or dealt enough hits to reach a pip of the meter, you can press R2 after you do a particular special move (every partner has particular artes they can do this with) to do a super powerful move. Filling the bar all the way means you can use those special moves as much as you want until the meter runs out and/or unleash an ultimate attack. Tons of Tales games have overlimit mechanics like this, but this is definitely the overlimit mechanic that I've enjoyed and actually used the most instead of just forgetting to ever use it XP The presentation is really nice. Music is pretty and atmospheric, which is very usual for a Tales game, and the anime graphics style of Tales is as pretty as it always is. Character design is good and fan service is very thankfully kept low (save for a few fairly revealing outfits). There are some slight performance hitches in very large battles (generally post-game battles or optional super hard fights with lots of movement and particle effects), but even when they happen they don't disrupt your ability to fight too badly. It feels more like you suddenly have bullet time than anything XD Verdict: Highly Recommended. This game didn't take the top spot of Tales of Graces for my favorite Tales game, but it came damn close. Xillia is honestly probably just a better game than Graces, if I'm being more objective, but Graces's themes and characters just hit home for me in a way I'm not sure any game can top. This is a really solid Tales game and an excellent one to check out if you've ever been interested in the series. It may not be quite as good as Vesperia to use as your entry to the series, if you've ever played one at all before, but it's still a really good one that you wouldn't be going wrong with either as a newbie or a series veteran~
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I finally got my save cart for my Saturn in the mail, so my urge to play more Saturn RPGs was revived~. Lunar was a game I played like a decade ago on PS1 and had a not terribly amazing time with. It was brutally hard in a way I really disliked. I liked the game alright, but just got soft-locked in a too hard area I could never get out of. The localization was handled by Working Designs, and as such it was made far far harder than the Japanese original simply because they could. I was really excited to play the Japanese original since it would mean I'd finally get the originally intended difficulty balancing, and I was not disappointed~ (at least for the most part x3). It took me around 39 hours to beat the game on real hardware.
Lunar is the story of a quiet young man named Aresu (Alex, in English) who dreams of going off on an adventure someday and becoming a great hero and dragon master just like his hero, Dragon Master Dain. One day, a great earthquake opens up the nearby cave where the great white dragon is said to sleep, and his best friend Ramus encourages him to set off there to find a dragon diamond for them to sell. Alex's adoptive sister Luna insists on coming along too, and once there they not only meet the dragon but also begin a quest for Alex to pass the tests of the other three dragons and become the next dragon master. Of course, this quest itself turns into something much grander, but the start is of humble beginnings befitting many RPGs of this era. Something I'd never realized is that the 1996 Lunar: Silver Star Story is actually a very extensive remake of a Mega CD game from 1992. The overall premise and overall ending of the story are more or less the same (so far as I'm aware), but a TON has been changed in between. Dungeons were added and removed, important characters were given more involved roles in the story and for longer, and new animated cutscenes were added as well. Along your journey you'll meet several more party members each with their own well fleshed out personalities, but most characters you meet and places you go aren't the most dynamic bits of writing in the world. The dialogue is charming and entertaining and the plot and the mystery are engaging, but the biggest narrative problem that Lunar has (other than unfortunately falling into some homophobic and racist stereotypes, granted that's hardly unique for a video game from the 90's, or even now) is that it just can't escape being a remake of a much more simple game from 1992. While one or two main party members have something of a character arc, most characters simply have a goal and work towards it, and for most of the story that goal is just "save the world". Where a game like FF6 (from 1994) has many characters and the trials and arcs each of those characters go through all support a general theme, Lunar: Silver Star Story more so has characters who all sort of exist and take actions in support of a larger theme. There isn't nearly as much introspection into the flaws of characters and/or why they might do the things they do, they more often just do them. The overall theme of the game (at least how I read it) is using the different characters (both goodies and baddies) to compare the different things people will do to protect the people and things they care most about, and I think despite the relatively flat writing that it manages to do that quite well. A prime example is Alex, the main character. In the original Mega CD game, he's completely silent and never talks. His little flying cat-dragon companion Naru does basically all the talking for him, very much like Link's fairies do in the N64 Zelda games. In Silver Star Story, the quite clever way they get around this is by just making Alex a canonically quite demure character who only says things when he absolutely must, and generally just keeps quiet. It works pretty well, and as someone with non-verbal tendencies myself, I always love to see a well done character who canonically just doesn't talk much, but it really doesn't get around the fact that Alex is a very flat character whose only real character trait (if you can call it that) is that he always cares about his friends and saving the world (and the person most special to him). The way the story and characters are written aren't so much bad in a vacuum, so much as they are a clear indication that the writing team is capable of doing more, and they were doing just about as much as they could with the tools at hand to expand a much more simple narrative into something more meaningful and engaging without doing a FF7 Remake and making something entirely new. The mechanics of the game use positional combat on a more traditional JRPG turn-based battle formula. Each character has items, spells, and normal attacks they can do, but they also have a movement allowance to get close enough to an enemy to strike them (something basically only important for booping with physical attacks or happening to stand out of the way of an enemy's AOE attack). It works well in practice, but it does mean that battles can drag on for quite a while because it makes the already slightly gratuitous animations take even longer. Thankfully this has Earthbound-style enemies that you bump into in dungeons, and no random encounters (and no encounters of any kind on the world map, oddly enough). The AI of the movement isn't the best though. In this version at least (I'm not sure if it's true for the PS1 version), there's no way to manually move, so AI movement takes care of it all, and sometimes allies and enemies will totally waste a turn if they're boxed in and can't get to the target they want to punch in the face. This isn't a huge problem beyond it being annoying that, in a game where enemy and especially boss AOE attacks can be so devastating, you have no way to manually split up the party to avoid location-based (rather than target-based) attacks. Thankfully, the boss and dungeon design of this version of the game are balanced really well even though the bosses of the game do have some stats (most often HP) that scale to the level of the main character. Every boss I fought but one (the 3rd to last boss is SO mean, omg) was something challenging and satisfying to beat but still one I could beat in just one try. The presentation of the game is really nice. Now this version of the game isn't the 1997 version (which the PS1 port is based on) that uses the Saturn's RAM expansion to give the ability for better cutscenes, so all of the cutscenes appear in a size that's half the screen and still often VERY blocky-looking (they look like Sega CD cutscenes, and I thought they must've been ripped right from that version for quite some time). Still, they're well animated and voice acted. The character portraits are well drawn and expressive, in-game sprites look very nice, and the music is also very good. They sexualize the female characters (especially the 15 year olds ^^;) in a way that made me pretty uncomfortable at times, but it never went far enough that it was something I'd call a reason to stay away from the game completely. It's something to be aware of, but this isn't nearly as exploitation-heavy as something like Corpse Party. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Working Designs really went out of their way to make the PS1 localization of this game far more grindy in its gameplay and sophomoric in its writing, but the original Saturn version gets two thumbs up from me. It's a really sweet story that, while imperfect and not terribly impressive for the time, is still a delight to go through and satisfying in its own right. It's a well made RPG that shows just how dedicated Game Arts were to their craft, and it's a damn shame a version this fun to play never officially made it to English-speaking audiences. Next on my chronological list of SMT games to play was the first Persona game, but I didn't have it yet, so while I waited for it to come in the mail, I settled on playing something else relatively short and non-RPG-ish until then. The only thing I could think of out of the games I had recently picked up in another bundle of very cheap games from the resale mall was Alundra. I'd heard good things about it, but it was something I picked up on a whim more than anything. I barely even had much idea what sort of game it was, beyond some sort of action title. And so I bravely stumbled forth into this 2D Zelda-like game published in '97 by Sony (and made by a newly minted dev team staffed partially by Landstalker veterans). It took me about 30 hours to finish the (quite different) Japanese version of the game.
Alundra tells the story of the titular young man Alundra. Sent by a beckoning figure in recurring dreams, the story begins on a voyage to a far off village, and since this is a fantasy adventure from the 90's, the ship he's on inevitably gets sundered into pieces by a mysterious massive storm. Washed up on shore and saved by the village's blacksmith, he finds himself in a village of mysteries. A village robbed of its ability to create, villagers plagued by never ending nightmares, and a strange church on the hilltop that a few (looked down upon) villagers pray to for salvation. It's not the most original setup by any means, but it ends up going places I certainly didn't expect it to. Alundra's story is a surprisingly serious and often quite dark one, and it repeatedly caught me off guard in just how large the body count gets by the end of the game. There isn't a lot of levity in the text itself, but that levity is sorta provided second-hand by the nature of it being an action-adventure game. The main theme of the story is not around how faith itself is bad, but how those who would seek to exploit people abuse their faith to manipulate them. It's a remarkably topical story for a Zelda-like game, and while it does have some trouble with setup and payoff at times (particularly around the blacksmith's story), I found it to be a quite story I really enjoyed. The gameplay of Alundra is something I can best sum up with "Did you ever think that Link to the Past would be improved with more difficult puzzles, the addition of (often very hard) platforming, and a generally harder combat difficulty as well?" XD. It's a 2D Zelda-like game with tons of dungeons to explore, bosses to fight, sub-weapons to wield and even a few main weapons to experiment with. Dungeons and puzzles are all well designed, but as I explained before, it's just all pretty damn hard. There are some really brain bending mental puzzles, some absolutely fiendish platforming puzzles among the generally quite difficult ones, and bosses that while well designed take an awful long time to kill. This is mitigated by mid-dungeon save/heal points (though only one per dungeon, and sometimes not that well placed), the ability to get quite a lot of healing items to bring into dungeons, and a generally quite low price for failing any of the platforming puzzles. But there are more problems than just an overall difficulty. Mind you, that difficulty is probably the #1 thing that will drive anyone away from Alundra. If you aren't very comfortable with 2D action games in the Zelda style, you're likely going to have a very hard time with Alundra, as it's easily one of the hardest games in the genre I've played. I actually managed to do the entire game without looking up any puzzle solutions (which I was kinda proud of myself for), but there were some that took me a heck of a lot longer to do than I thought they would. And the platforming may be already tricky, with tons of jumps right from the start requiring you to edge-jump if you want a chance of making it, but the camera perspective doesn't help things. Alundra is a 2D game, and while some of you may've recoiled in horror at the word "Landstalker" in the start of this review, you can rest safely that this game doesn't have an isometric perspective like that. Unfortunately, what it does have is a more Zelda-like top-down view with LOTS of platforming toward and away from the camera (on the vertical axis). It's difficult to judge where you're going to land when jumping like this, and even though Alundra's foot hitbox is pretty big and you do have a very reliable shadow to guide you, you're still gonna have quite a time dealing with the jumping puzzles even if you're a veteran to retro platformers like myself. It's by no means a deal breaker, especially with how small the penalty for failure often is (almost always just a short walk back to where the start of the jumping puzzle is), but it can definitely get frustrating and is something very worth keeping in mind. The presentation of the game is VERY pretty. Beautifully animated 2D art and animations (they've gotta be some of the nicest looking on the PS1, at least for '97) make for a beautiful adventure with a more earthy color palette than most other games in the genre tend to have. The music is also excellent, having both fun upbeat tunes as well as more somber affecting tracks for emotional beats. It isn't always perfect with the timing of when to use these (happy village music playing over emotional scenes doesn't happen *every* time, but it happens often enough to be weird), but when it uses them well it works damn good. There are 2D animated cutscenes as well, but it's more like just one cutscene, and it plays at the very end of the game to serve as a sort of flashback on how you got here as well as an epilogue. It's very weird to just suddenly have it there, especially with the main character going from his usual yellow to suddenly red hair, and it reads like something that was commissioned much earlier in development and ended up being far too different to the end product to actually use anywhere else ^^;. The game has a very 90's art style for its characters, and they look nice in those animated cutscenes, but I found them pretty darn ugly in the in-game portraits. The last thing worth commenting on is the changes between the Japanese and English versions of the game, as if you're going to play the English version (which I think it's a safe bet virtually everyone reading this review would be), you should go in knowing that it was localized and worsened by none other than Working Designs. In their usual fashion, they made the game significantly harder (giving the already overly tanky bosses FAR more HP) and the writing significantly worse (I guess they were trying to add some levity, but it just does not work with the original tone at all, at least from what I've seen of the English version). Alundra still seems overall fine in English, but from what I have seen it is quite easily an inferior product to the writing and balancing in the original Japanese version. Verdict: Recommended. Alundra would be a highly recommended game if it didn't have the camera perspective or difficulty issues, but it's still a damn fine game. I enjoyed the hell out of it, and managed to put 30 hours into this thing in only three days I was having so much fun. I'd hesitate to call it a hidden gem on the PS1, but it's definitely one worth checking out if you're into 2D Zelda-like games and aren't afraid of something a bit harder than you're likely used to from Nintendo's offerings in the genre~. I was considering stopping playing SMT after I was finished with the SFC games available on Switch Online, but then a friend of mine finally convinced me to buy the Saturn I've been debating picking up for the past couple years XD. SMT if was so successful that it basically threw SMT 3 onto the backburner for years and years as Atlus took those same ideas about a smaller-scale story and tried them out in different ways, with the Devil Summoner series going in one direction, and the Persona series (the first three anyhow) going in the other. Upon learning that not only was the first of this mixed Devil Summoner/Persona series on the Saturn but that it also didn't even have a fan translation, I was too intrigued to not pick up that Saturn and dive into this. I'll admit I was pretty damn intimidated going into my first SMT game I'd be playing with no save states or rewinds to help me, but it ended up being nowhere near as bad as I feared it'd be. It took me about 50 some odd hours (that's a best guess, as this is another SMT game that doesn't tell you your play time) to finish the game on real hardware.
Devil Summoner tells the story of you, a college student who is hanging out with his girlfriend one day. You go get some weird book from the library when you then split up to get some tickets from a ticket office for a concert later that week (the pre-internet purchasing days were a WILD time, huh?), only to find it full of blood-thirsty demons. You're saved from certain death by a mysterious but arrogant man who introduces himself as Kyouji Kuzunoha, a devil summoner and private investigator. Upon leaving the building, you're stopped by a man named Sid. A strangely dressed foreigner who nonetheless has pretty good Japanese, who teleports you into a building with no escape as he demands you hand over the book you checked out earlier (your girlfriend forgot her library card, so it was checked out under your name), and upon learning you don't have it, he kills you. Charon awaits you at the River Styx, but tells you it not only isn't your time yet, but you also can't go back to your body, so upon being sent back you wind up in the body of the recently deceased... Kyouji Kuzunoha, and a new devil summoner is born! That's only the first twenty or thirty minutes of the plot (explained in perhaps a bit more detail than needed), but I'm going to such lengths to try and get across just how much more emphasis on characters and dialogue are present in this story compared to prior SMT games. Despite how story-focused the three SFC games are, they don't really have THAT much text (certainly not story-important text) compared to many contemporary JRPGs. The jump from the Super Famicom to the Saturn almost feels like the jump from the Famicom to the Super Famicom in regards to just how much more story is here. It's got a bunch of silly and/or interesting characters (from the James Bond villain-like gun store owner to your ever skeptical investigation partner Rei), but the main story isn't really all that deep. It's an engaging mystery to figure out just what's going on with Sid and the appearances of all the demons, sure, but there's not really character arcs going on here. It's more like a blockbuster thriller film, where the events and how they happen are more interesting than the actual deeper beliefs of the characters in the narrative. To give credit where credit is due, the main theme of the story being about how the higher escalations of society (both legitimate and illegitimate) more often work together to the benefit of themselves and the expense of all us normal people is done well. Just outside of the modern setting, that theme isn't exactly terribly unique among JRPGs from the 90's. It's a well done story with charming dialogue that I enjoyed my time with, but it's not exactly setting the world on fire. The mechanics of the game are still very recognizably SMT, as you go through dungeons in first-person and have random battles with demons whom you recruit via negotiations and can fuse into more powerful demons (with some retaining skills from whom they were fused by). You also still put a point into a single stat (strength, intelligence, magic, vitality, speed, or luck) upon leveling up instead of getting general stat boosts. It's simultaneously a further polishing of the non-Persona-y parts of SMT IF (no guardian-spirits, thank heck). Returning from SMT IF, we have mechanics such as no aligment due to narrative choices, and your alignment only being a factor of the balance of demons in your group (law ones don't wanna be with chaos ones and vice versa). The narrative is actually completely linear now. Another few mechanics are the inability to use melee from the back row (although some spear weapons do allow that now), and how guns have limited bullets (although you can buy them MUCH faster now and running out of them is never really a problem, as they have stacks of 999 now). The entire inventory system has been super improved, really, as you can carry 30 of normal items and those massive bullet stacks in a *nearly* (but not actually) unlimited space inventory. Speaking of improved features, the dungeon and overall game design are definitely among them. With the exception of the town hall (which I'd call easily the hardest dungeon in the game), all of the dungeons are of very reasonable length and have very reasonable trap design. You'll never have a truly hellish or unreasonable massive labyrinth of darkness, teleporter mazes, or pitfalls (at least not nearly to the degree the previous games do). Dungeons also have much more detailed looks to their graphics now, and it's actually much easier (although not all the time) to use visual landmarks to find your way around without constantly referring to the auto-mapping tool. Money and magnetite (the resource you need to maintain having demons summoned) are still here, but I never had a problem having enough of either, thankfully, and usable items are cheap and easily bought in the shops. You can even get an item (although only one at a time) that lets you save anywhere outside of battle, which makes retrying difficult bosses WAY easier. Getting sniped by a stray instant-death spell is still a danger, but there's even late-game equipment you can find to be totally immune to instant death, which is certainly more than the other SMT games up to this point could say XD. The overall difficulty with both the dungeons and bosses are really well tuned, and this is actually a game in the series I could recommend to non-SMT fans who just like JRPGs and confidently believe that they could finish it without getting too frustrated. The biggest changes, however, are in regards to demons and how battle itself works. Some of these changes are good, but some of them are on the more not so good end. On the good end, we have a total rework to how combat works. You can still talk to demons to negotiate with them, and this is definitely my favorite way demon negotiation has been since they got rid of the simpler (and better :b) system that SMT 1 used. You need high enough intelligence to get them to get on your side (I found 15 to be a good amount), but there's a good mix of conversation and randomness to how they talk with you. However, the important thing here is how they appear in battle. They are now much more like contemporaries like Dragon Quest in that you just have an assortment of demons in front of you, and what you literally see is what you're fighting. Gone are the systems of the previous 5 games of only fighting one or two types of enemies who have 1~8 members of their species with them, and this much more standard system works much better. It may not be unique, but it just works better and makes battles go more quickly (although the auto-battle system actually goes much more slowly now so you can more easily see what is happening to whom and why). But it's about time I addressed the big, cranky, uncooperative elephant in the room: Demon Loyalty. Anyone who knows of this game's sequel, Soul Hackers, (which was actually localized on the 3DS), will likely be extremely aware of the new mechanic of demon loyalty. No longer will demons simply do as they're told. There are 10 ranks of loyalty they can have, and if they're more loyal they'll do what you tell them, and if they're less loyal, they're more likely to disobey (or it may be impossible to even give them any kind of specific instructions at all). Depending on the personality they have, they'll prefer doing different commands, and you can buy them alcohol or give them gems to make them more loyal. However, even perfectly loyal demons (including your man-made demon Zouma) do sometimes disobey, meaning you can never perfectly rely on anyone but yourself and your human partner to do things exactly as needed. This IS a huge pain in the butt, but the game is actually forgiving enough (for an SMT game, anyhow) that this doesn't *need* to be a huge problem if you play around your demon's whims. The way I played, I just got demons who tended to do a certain thing with their minimum loyalty behavior that suited my purposes. Tough front line guys with few spells to fruitlessly spam who will wail away at targets in front of me, and back-row healers and support characters to help out if they feel like it. And demons are thankfully pretty smart even when they're not being told what to do, and will often heal or do buffs or de-buffs if they think they should. I was routinely surprised at just how eager (sometimes over-eager) they were to heal a hurt party member even with me never telling them to. While the demon loyalty system is definitely not a plus side of Devil Summoner, I was pleasantly surprised at how it is so easily not really a negative either. Presentation is really nice for a game released around the Saturn's first birthday. Sure, there's no bells and whistles like voice acting, and there's only a couple of animated cutscenes (which use really old 3D pre-rendered footage and often look very retro and/or funny XD), but the 2D and 3D both look quite good. The 2D sprites used for demons, humans, and portraits all look very nice with the art style, and the 3D environments both look nice and are well-detailed enough to make finding your way around a lot easier (as mentioned before). The music is also really good. With a lot of more upbeat and pumping tracks in addition to atmospheric ones, this is the first SMT game with a soundtrack I genuinely really enjoyed. There are some bugs and performance issues, but nothing major. When turning in the first-person mazes, screen tearing happens pretty darn often. It didn't bother me, but it's certainly the graphical issue I felt was most worth mentioning. Bugs are significant, but often not horrible. In the original (but not the special box edition re-release) version that I played, raising Kyouji's speed above 25 will make his speed glitch out and make him nearly always go last. Now speed is still a super valuable stat for how it increases defense, accuracy, and evasion, and there's actually a fair bit of utility in Rei almost always going first and Kyouji so reliably going last, but it's still annoying. The game also has some issues with certain negative status effects never triggering. I never once saw things like SHOCK or FREEZE actually work for either me or the enemy despite both the game and manual insisting they exist. The game also apparently has level drain, but I never once ran into it (thank heck). That all adds up to the game ultimately being more forgiving and fun, as the game is already plenty hard without that stuff, but it's definitely all stuff worth keeping in mind as you play. Verdict: Recommended. This game certainly has its shortcomings, but I really enjoyed my time with it. It's easily my favorite SMT game I've played so far, and one I definitely recommend. It's a little ironic that this is one of the only mainline games in the extended series to never be officially or unofficially localized, but if it does get translated or you can read enough Japanese to play it, this is definitely a JRPG worth checking out on the Saturn, even if you aren't otherwise a huge fan of SMT. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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